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Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for
by panglott 11y ago
Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. (IIRC it is widely spoken in China as an alternative to English.)
Esperanto is only considered a "failure" in terms of its original goal of becoming the second language of every educated person in the world. Not even any natural language, even such a powerful one as English, has ever achieved anything so ambitious.
- wolfgke 11y ago> Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. What evidence do you have the the number of Esperanto speakers are increasing? The best source I could find > http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 thinks that this question is very difficult to answer: Depending on the data that one considers the number of Esperanto speaker can be increasing or decreasing (first diagram hints at a strongly decreasing number since about 1990, second at an slowly, but steadily increasing number).
- panglott 11y ago"Gaining new speakers" is a less strong claim than "speaker population is increasing".